[*] Network device support --->
[*] Ethernet driver support --->
(disable every driver but this)
[*] AMD Devices
<*> AMD PCNet32 PCI support
[ ] Wireless LAN (ONLY if you disabled Wireless networking support above)
< > VMware VMXNET3 ethernet driver (PCNet32 is more than enough for most use cases - enable this only if you have spare cpu cycles to burn)

I forgot to mention that you'll need to edit your vmx to gain the full benefits of compiling your kernel with these drivers.
To enable VMCI, append vmci0.present = "TRUE" to your vmx file.

temporary_user, here's some information from the VMware site

ʘ wrote:

Without VMCI, virtual machines communicate with the host using the network layer. Using the network layer adds overhead to the communication. With VMCI communication overhead is minimal and different tasks that require that communication can be optimized.

Ϡ wrote:

The memory balloon driver (vmmemctl) collaborates with the server to reclaim pages that are considered least valuable by the guest operating system.
The driver uses a proprietary ballooning technique that provides predictable performance that closely matches the behavior of a native system under similar memory constraints. This technique increases or decreases memory pressure on the guest operating system, causing the guest to use its own native memory management algorithms. When memory is tight, the guest operating system determines which pages to reclaim and, if necessary, swaps them to its own virtual disk.

Ѫ wrote:

PVSCSI adapters are high-performance storage adapters that can result in greater throughput and lower CPU utilization. PVSCSI adapters are best suited for environments, especially SAN environments, where hardware or applications drive a very high amount of I/O throughput. PVSCSI adapters are not suited for DAS environments.
In other words, you don't need this if you're not using networked storage.

Ѯ wrote:

To configure an existing boot disk to use a PVSCSI adapter

Create a new temporary 1GB disk(SCSI 1:0) and assign a new SCSI controller (default is LSI LOGIC SAS).

Change the new SCSI controller to PVSCSI for the new SCSI controller.

Click Change Type.

Click VMware Paravirtual and click OK.

Click OK to exit the Virtual Machine Properties dialog.

Power on the virtual machine.

Verify the new disk was found and is visible. This confirms the PVSCSI driver is now installed.

Just a little note, I'm creating a new Gentoo VM on ESXi 5.1.0 and the network adapter uses the E1000 driver. So for everyone that added the PCNet32 and/or VMXNET3 modules and are still missing network interface(s) please make sure to add support for E1000.

Do virtualized kernels need to support things like CONFIG_CPU_FREQ or CONFIG_ACPI_PROCESSOR or even CONFIG_ACPI in general? I' ve taken a native kernel config and optimizing/minimizing for a VMware Workstation VM, so there may be lot of settings left which are not required on VMs._________________ppc:PowerBook5,8 15"(1440)-G4/1.67,2G | amd64:Acer Z5610 (Core2QuadQ8200),i5-3470,VMware VM @ i7-2620M | amd64-prefix:OpenSuse | Lila-Theme